Foto Friday: Majestic Sunset over Factory Butte
Majestic Sunset over Factory Butte, Hanksville, Utah. © 2024 Eric D. Brown
This is my third time featuring Factory Butte on Foto Friday, which probably tells you something.
Most photographers who visit Factory Butte shoot it from the south and east side, where the access road drops you into the badlands. Wide open desert with the butte rising alone out of the flats, big sky above it. Those are good photos and I’ve taken plenty of them myself .
This one is from the opposite side.
To get here, you have to drive around the Factory Butte then hike up the face of a neighboring butte. It’s not far, maybe a quarter mile, but it’s steep and loose and the kind of terrain where you’re using your hands as much as your feet. The reward is a vantage point that almost nobody bothers with: a shelf of deep red sandstone boulders with Factory Butte standing across the valley behind them.
I set up as the sun was going down and waited. The last light of the evening caught those foreground rocks first, turning them orange against the cooling sky. Then the pink hit the clouds above the butte. There’s maybe a five-minute window where both things are happening at once, where the warm foreground and the cool background create this tension that makes the image feel like it’s pulling in two directions.
That’s what I was after. Not just Factory Butte again, but Factory Butte as a backdrop to something most people never see because they don’t climb up to where these rocks are.
Every time I go back to Hanksville, I find something new. A different angle, a different time of day, a foreground I walked past last time without noticing. The landscape doesn’t change, but where I choose to stand does. I think that’s the part of photography I like most: the reminder that what you see depends entirely on where you’re willing to go to see it.
More of my photography at imagesbyericbrown.com or on Instagram .